Modeling Approach for Business Networks with an Integration and Business Perspective

Business Network Management (BNM) allows enterprises to manage their application integration and partner networks by making technical integration, business and social aspects visible within a network view and set them into context to each other. This allows various personas, like business user, integration expert and IT support to analyze, operate and develop business processes by collaborating on these contexts. Defining a model sufficient to represent the BNM domain with different layers of abstraction, from business to technical views and perspectives of network-structured data requires a standard, human- and machine readable notation. Modeling of real-world technical and business artifacts is widely addressed by UML [5], SCA [4] which cover parts of these requirements for BNM. However, none of them accounts for the combined business and technical nature of most enterprises, nor of the semantic network and data linking aspects. In this paper, we present design decisions for a model based on BPMN 2.0, that is sufficient for BNM and represents inter-related business and technical perspectives within the enterprise network.